Well to be in tune with the times I thought a back to school type of post might be in order.  I don’t know about your kids but mine seem to go through school bags on an almost monthly basis.  I don’t know how they do it. It may have something to do with always carrying a seemingly massive amount of books around and having the straps as loose as possible so that the bag is very low on their backs.  The bags invariably seem to rip where the carrying straps meet the bag itself.

There would seem to be two approaches to replacing the bags. Firstly to buy a bag (that the kids are willing to wear) as cheaply as possible  on the grounds that the bag is not going to last long anyway. Or secondly to look for a bag which may cost more, but is built to a high enough level of quality that it will survive a lot longer. Having tried both approaches in the recent past we seem to have had fairly inconclusive results, so we lean towards the cheaper bags but look for strength where it matters.

As my two older children are now regularly taking their laptops to school, this means extra weight and a need for padding while still having room for school books. We have started to look around for bags that meet our requirements. One that caught my eye was the HP Sport Backpack which has good reviews and seems to big enough for school books as well.

Do you have the same problems with the longevity of your computer bags?

I have talked before about how useful a mini mouse can be for using with a laptop. especially so when working while traveling. I find that using a mouse rather than the trackpad of a laptop is a much better way of maintaining a good position when working on a laptop for long periods of time.  In other words the sort of thing you often end up doing when working in some faceless hotel in some city or country around the world.

Unfortunately my previous mini mouse suddenly stopped working for reasons unknown. But what I do know is that my younger kids could not help themselves from endlessly playing with the retractable cable holder that is designed to hold the connecting USB cable neatly while the mouse is not in use. They just loved pulling the cable out and back on an almost continuous basis. Now I can not confirm that this caused or even contributed to the demise of my mouse but I thought I would look around for a replacement with out the cable.

After searching around and even trying out various models of wireless mice, I finally settled on the Logitech V450 Laser Cordless Mouse which after using for a couple of days I am really happy with.  I like the design which although slightly bigger than my previous mouse seems to be even more comfortable to hold. I have had absolutely no connection problems with the wireless and even better, the mouse seems to be able to cope with a lot more different surfaces than my old one.  If you are look for a wireless mouse for your laptop than I can certainly recommend this one.

Do you use a mouse with your laptop?

I was out looking for computer bags with my son over the weekend. We have just bought him his first laptop for him to use both at home and school and to stop the endless fights with his brothers over access to a computer! So we needed a bag that could take not only his new computer but also all the school books that he has to carry around with him during the day.

He actually seems to carry around a huge amount of stuff on a daily basis, which can be quite heavy and once we add a laptop to all that, it’s going to be heavier still. I actually can’t remember having to carry that much stuff around with me when I was a school, but it was a long time ago and perhaps my memory has dimmed. One result of all this is that any bag we buy will have to have very durable straps and have significant reinforcing where the straps are attached to the bag.

I starting my search by doing a bit of online research, looking for ideas and potential backups in case we didn’t find anything worth buying while walking around the huge Dubai Malls. After checking out a few of the more specialised websites and hitting Pricegrabber I decided that something like this highly rated Targus Metro Notebook Backpack would do just fine. This bag looks good has a good number of compartments and pockets and according to reviews has a very good strong construction.

So off we went and we actually found an almost identical Targus backpack, which seemed to be very well built, had the right number of separate compartments and most important of all was acceptable to the lad in question!

Have you seen any expectational or outstanding examples of a computer bag recently?

Following on from the previous post about memory, I thought we would have another look at flash drives. We have had a look at them before but now there are some very large capacity flash drives available which are becoming more and more cost effective.

Convenience of a floppy disk

OK so hands up how many of you remember floppy disks? How many have still got a floppy disk drive in your computer? Floppy disks are pretty much a thing of the past, although I do have to admit to remembering a time when they were one of the newest things around, but perhaps the least said about that the better! Things moved on and the writable CD appeared which while it was less convenient, it provided a lot more storage space. The thing about a writeable CD though was that they were nowhere near as easy to use as a floppy drive. It was much more of a process compared to the stick the disk in, drag your contents across, and away you go process with the floppy disk. Unfortunately CD’s were soon not big enough either as storage requirements where also increasing as we started hoarding digital content like music and photographs

Enter the flash drive

Nowadays the flash drive or USB stick have become the standard manual way of moving data from computer to computer or for the temporary storing of data. And they are great, we are back to a nice easy of capturing any data that you want to go. But of course storage requirements keep rising and I am finding that my trusty 1GB Flash drive is at times just not big enough. The good news is that there are some huge capacity drives available that while a little more expensive will not break the bank. Take a look at the Corsair 16GB Voyager USB Flash Drive for example which is what I am considering for my next flash drive. Very useful for travel.

How do you use your flash drive?

I am sitting here at home in the dark, with my laptop sucking on its last few minutes of battery power. Yes real excitement in the house as all the power has gone off, and with it my access to the internet, and most of my computers. The laptop was not fully charged as I was using it on battery at the office, but as I do have a few minutes left I thought I would bash out a quick post.

We are in the dark here as my local sub station burst into flames sometime this afternoon, which is sort of interesting I suppose. But what this has really brought home to me is how much I take for granted the ability to instantly connect anytime I want to the Internet. I was sitting here with the kids in bed, really wanting to get down to some surfing and perhaps even a little blogging. Well I can, because fortunately I still have a little juice left in the battery, but it won’t be for long!

Given that I have often in the past been short of battery power while traveling and how close I am right now to the “hibernating” message, I thought I would briefly talk about laptop batteries. Batteries are the thing you are always hearing about being recalled. You know what I mean the “500 people catch fire in laptop battery disaster, 4 million batteries recalled“ type of headlines. However a spare battery or power pack can be very useful in some situations. Like now for me! Only last week or so ago I was looking at the PSA 60Wh Universal External Laptop Battery, pity I didn’t get one, I think I could use it so…….

I am presently spending a lot of my time commuting, and the way I help pass the time, whether I am driving or as a passenger is to listen to either music or the podcasts to which I subscribe . I find that what really makes a big difference to the whole listening experience is having a good set of earphones. At one time I didn’t consider that this was a real necessity until at one point when I was using my standard issue earphones, I found that they where getting really uncomfortable after a few hours. So I looked around for a more comfortable pair and ended up being blown away by the improved sound performance.

Another thing that I have discovered is that when you travel as much as me, you end up spending a lot of time trying to get to sleep on airplanes. I have never been good at this, but the biggest challenge I find for this is blocking out the background white noise. I have discovered that a good comfortable pair of noise cancellation earphones is ideal for this, either with the volume turned right down or a low level of background music.

Of course everyones ears are a different shape and the sound quality will vary, with the best quality usually costing a lot more. So my advice is to look around for the best sound performance in your price bracket and the try some out for comfort. A pair that I can recommend are the Shure SE210 Black Sound Isolating Earphones, shown left, which have good performance and are reasonably priced. If you have a no limit budget then for sound quality I think you will find it very hard to beat the Shure SE530 Sound Isolating Earphones, shown above.

How do you manage to get to sleep on planes? I would be interested to hear.